NSSF: “Gun Crimes PLUMMET Even as Gun Sales RISE”

The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) is a champion for firearm and hunting rights as well as preserving hunting lands for the public. As more and more depressing, controversial, and appalling news swirls in the media related to crime and firearms the NSSF is here to set the record straight.

Since the early 1990s, homicides, other crimes, and accidents involving firearms have decreased dramatically– a trend that a majority of Americans say they are unaware of.

In the last 2 weeks multiple horrifying deaths and tragedies have occurred throughout the US as well as several violent protests and demonstrations. This is not something I am here to directly talk about, but the NSSF would like to remind everybody that firearms are not the problem.

Credit: NSSF

Homicides are down significantly in the US since 1991. As it was eluded to earlier, most people are not aware of the decline in crime, but it is actually pretty significant.

Credit: NSSF

Other crimes committed with a firearm are down even more. To go from approximately 1.6 Million crimes involving firearms to roughly 500,000 is a phenomenal step in the right direction.

Credit: NSSF

A statistic that a lot of people are aware of is the spike in gun sales. Firearm sales continue to grow every year dispute crime decreasing. Must be some sort of correlation… just maybe.

Credit: NSSF

We as a nation are also getting safer with our use of firearms. To see a drop in unintentional firearm fatalities of 82% is staggering in the best way possible!

Credit: NSSF

It is also a surprising statistic that every 2 in 5 homes now have a firearm, or more precisely, 41% of American homeowners.

Credit: NSSF

We probably do not have to tell you that the media likes to report crime. The only topics viewed more important are the weather and your daily commute.

If some of these stats seem too impressive, the NSSF can back it up. In the last infographic they show where they gathered their sources for the data.

My advice to all of our readers out there as the media reports more tragic and sad news: be proficient with your firearms and share the shooting sports. Teach others who are willing to learn. Be knowledgeable and skilled with the firearms you own. It will make you a better hunter, shooter, and steward of our sport.

Hello everyone! The outdoors, Crossfit, and anything firearm related have always been my passions. I’ve been a guest writer for Sierra Bullets, am a Smith & Wesson Armorer, reloader, and have an addiction to classic S&W and Colt revolvers. Be sure to visit TFB frequently and keep your magazines full, my friends!

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Joseph Smith

Great piece! So, um, are we allowed to talk politics here now? Because the obvious question is….

If guns are making America safer, why are certain people trying to ban guns?

And the only answer I have to that question is frightening.

Bill

“If guns are making America safer, why are certain people trying to ban guns?”

But there isn’t any evidence that more guns are making the States more safe. More of one and less of the other doesn’t meant that there is a cause and effect relationship. Plenty of nations have fewer guns and less crime than we do. Other nations have more guns and more crime.

Joseph Smith

See my comment above.

Also, the ownership of firearms amongst lawful peaceful citizens and criminals is the key. A gun is just a tool that allows the bearer to project violence. The ability to balance violence, even absent actual use (causation), has utility in and of itself.

David Harmon

CDC did a study that concluded that yes, it is a result of the increased number of guns.

Bill

That wouldn’t be the same CDC study that the pro-gun side claims is bad science, would it be?

David Harmon

I can’t read minds, if you want my comment on it, post a link to what you’re talking about. As for “pro-gun” side, there is no “pro-gun” side in the us.

There are pro-gun individuals, and then there are organizations that wheel and deal away their right’s.

Big Daddy

People with an agenda do not care about facts or what is right, it’s about their agenda right or wrong. They even have the idea that the end justifies the means, so if it means lying, deceiving and any other morally corrupt practice it’s OK as long as they are righteous. Every bogus righteous group uses this philosophy.

Doubleoevan

Look…this is going to sound like an opinion one way or another, but it’s really not. I just want to point out the danger of using or relying on statistics. Correlation does not equal causation (blah blah blah). The percentage of people and households that own guns in the U.S. are actually down over the same period of time despite the increase in overall guns. Basically less people own more guns. Does a lesser number of people owning more guns reduce gun violence? Does the criminal element have less guns now than 20 years ago leading to the reduction in gun violence? What does that mean in relation to the above? I have no idea. It’s Friday and I’m done thinking.

Harry’s Holsters

I’ve heard that but I know more first time gun owners now than 10 years ago. I find it hard to believe based off the things I’m personally saying. I’d like to see the parameters of the polls that came to that conclusion. My cousin took concealed carry classes every weekend for two months straight to meet women. It worked surprisingly well.

Bill

Proficiency with firearms is good, so is proficiency with statistics. “Must be some sort of correlation… just maybe.” Correlation frequently means nothing: Ice cream sales and outdoor rapes correlate also, but there isn’t a causal link just because both happen more frequently in warmer weather.

There are WAY too many variables in the analysis of violent crime to single out firearms as either a cause OR cure. They are a convenient excuse for antis. but they shouldn’t, and cannot be a convenient crutch for the pro-gun side either.

Correlation doesn’t deny causation, either; the biggest problem here is that most of those other variables at play boil down to Things Nobody Wants To Talk About, like institutional racism and classism, artificially-maintained income inequality, artificially maintained unemployment levels, a deliberately broken public education system, and a deliberately broken corporate-controlled healthcare system. Succesful empires throughout history have understood that fat, happy peasants have no reason to revolt, and by the same token, well-represented citizens with good jobs and steady incomes and safe neighborhoods and reasonably priced healthcare and good schools for their kids have no reason aside from latent insanity to pick up a gun and use it on an innocent stranger. Trying to stop firearm-related crime by focusing on the firearms is treating the symptoms with snake oil while ignoring the disease.

You think you’re joking, but I have literally heard a man complain that he didn’t understand what went wrong, because he switched from Marlboro 100s to Marlboro Lights when his doctor told him to lay off the cigarettes; he said this through a hole in the plastic where his trachea used to be, while wearing a hospital gown and pulling an IV stand along with him, lurching along on the sidewalk outside the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston next to friend who was smoking. As I walked by, he took the cigarette from his friend and took a drag off it through the freakin’ hole in his neck.

One of the most nightmarishly surreal things I’ve ever witnessed.

Gary Kirk

Who said I was joking brother.. Have a couple friends with traechiatimies.. Am a welder myself, remember when I quit smoking.. Was all proud, went to my doc, he asked “you still welding?”.. Yeah.. “Why’d you quit smoking”..

The question of ‘what’ casuation is exactly is far more complicated than just saying ‘guns!”.

There is a wide variety of factors, such as demographics, legislation, foreign policy, healthcare, and economics.

This is where I engage in hopeless metaphorical knife fights with both pro-gun and anti-gun proponents.

Bill

You and me both, brother. People on both sides want simplistic solutions that fit their ideology in the face of extremely complex problems that deny, and will never have, easy explanations or solutions.

Joseph Smith

I hear ya, but it wasn’t gun rights folks who made the correlation leap. It is the gun control crowd who frequently state (as fact) that the number of guns in the US make us collectively less safe.

Cuomo/Deblasio frequently blame the availability of and access to guns in other states (some across the country) as the reason they continue to experience “gun violence.”

Anecdotally, we know that a violent criminal where CCW is legal has to do a lot more math than he does in a gun free utopia. This creates consequences which become disincentives. Same principle is in play on home invasions.

And I don’t for a moment believe the percentage of gun owners has gone down. I think many people are afraid to tell strangers they have guns. I think other people are ideological hypocrites who individually see the value/necessity of owning a firearm but would never admit to such.

Criminals may be a cowardly and superstitious lot, but they do appear capable of understanding probability and simple arithmetic. Roughly one in 20 adults in Texas has a License To Carry, which means any time a criminal attacks an adult, there’s a ~5% chance they’re going to either get shot, held at gunpoint until The Uniforms arrive, or chased away under fear of GSWs; meanwhile, back at the ranch dressing, California– where roughly 1 in 1,000 adults are licensed to carry– sees ~150% as many murders committed with firearms.

Bill

Alaska has high levels of gun ownership and high levels of violent crime. NYC has low levels of gun owner ship and lower levels of violent crime that have dropped like a rock in the last 50 years.

Criminal don’t do math, calculate odds or make decisions based on probability or logic. If they did, the probability is high that they wouldn’t be criminals. The fact that 1 in 20 Texans may be carrying a gun doesn’t mean a whole lot – becoming the victim of a crime involves a lot of lifestyle issues, many CCW holders may never wind up in the position of being a victim of violent crime.

…And Vermont has high levels of gun ownership and low levels of crime (with no state gun control laws), while Hawaii has low levels of gun ownership and low levels of crime and California, New Jersey, and Illinois have low levels of gun ownership and high levels of crime (all with strict gun control laws). Local conditions vary widely, which is one of the main arguments against gun control: it is, incontrovertibly, not nearly as significant a determining factor in local violent crime/firearm-related crime rates as are other conditions.

Criminals absolutely “do the math” figuratively, even if literal numerical figures aren’t necessarily involved, because unless they’re high as a kite they aren’t going after potential victims who might pose a real threat to them, or committing crimes when/where they think they have a significant chance of getting caught/hurt. Pretty much every reputable study that’s ever been done, for example, shows that burglars tend to avoid homes with dogs and/or barred windows and sturdy doors than a neighboring house that lacks such impediments.

Cart before the horse, caballero. Crime of all types is much more prevalent in ghettoized neighborhoods because decades or centuries of institutional racism and elitism deliberately packed the poorest and darkest people into the worst parts of town to keep them away from the ~~nice neighborhoods~~, and burglars/robbers tend to strike close to home, in familiar areas where they already know the best avenues of escape; you get a lot of burglaries on your block, you bar your doors and windows, that’s just horse sense. It’s a strategy that works fairly well, given that something like a third of burglars just stroll on in through unlocked doors or windows, and roughly three quarters of burglaries are over in 8-12 minutes; if it’s gonna take a dude ten minutes to crowbar a door open, he’s probably just gonna move on to the next house over instead.

Gary Kirk

Criminal don’t do the math, you don’t do the English.. No, criminals do not tend to think about the consequences of their actions.. But they do tend to readily think about their potential victims.. Do I Rob the armored truck.. Or the lunch truck leaving the construction site.. They DO pick their victims, and if there is even the remote chance that said victim is armed and prepared to defend themself.. They normally will move on to a more criminal friendly victim.. That believes in gun control

Bill

Dude, armored truck get robbed regularly, not lunch trucks, because armored truck are Where The Money Is. The Ruder Schweigen targeted them deliberately. I don’t think I’m giving away any secrets when noting that they are routinely held up at stops, when the runner is out of the truck making drop-off and pick-ups

Google it; [taco truck robbed] returns about as many results as [armored car robbed] and [armored truck robbed] put together, which doesn’t account for all the other variations of rolling restauranteering, or for how famous and newsworthy armored truck robberies tend to be. An armored truck making a cash delivery/pickup is a high risk, high reward target– because you might get away with a huge score of cash, or you might get shot fifteen or twenty times– while a lunchwagon is guaranteed to have a lot of small (i.e., completely untraceable) bills, is highly likely to be staffed by the sort of poor and brown folks who absolutely do not want to talk to any LEOs, and is highly unlikely to be heavily armed.

No, you’d actually have to start with a focus statement, hypothesis and literature review.

The interweb has made people forget that actual research is actual work.

Doubleoevan

“I think many people are afraid to tell strangers they have guns”

That’s the rub with these stats/surveys isn’t it. If someone called me from a survey company and asked if I had guns, I probably wouldn’t tell them one way or another. I’d refuse to take the survey. But unless something changed with their methodology or the demographics of the group they’re surveying, you’d probably have a similar percentages of people that would lie or refuse to take the survey. Over time, it’s possible that the demographics of gun owners have changed, especially with younger/newer gun owners coming into the fold.

Again, all this points to statistics and surveys being misleading at best.

JumpIf NotZero

Here is the issue with not understanding correlation/causation.

You can’t say that more guns EQUALS more crime. That’s probably true, but can’t be proved. There is evidence that shows this certainly could be true because the casual glance has both sides of the equataiton as true.

However….

What we CAN say is that more guns DOES NOT EQUAL more crime. This isn’t correlation/causation. This is that we have evidence that says this is not true. We know as guns go up, crime does not. So we know that more guns != more crime but that’s not the same thing as above where we’d be mistaken into saying the opposite.

More guns less crime – you have evidence but no proof.

More guns more crime – you have neither.

So it’s important to be able to refute that AT WORST more guns has no bearing on more crime. AT BEST more guns equals less crime – but we don’t know.

Doubleoevan

But even that conclusion is complicated. I think the only thing the stats prove is that more guns in the hands of the same people that had them before does not equate to more crime. That in and of itself is pretty meaningless.

Bill

It might help if more people thought in terms of a null hypothesis: i.e. the presence or number of guns in a population does not increase or decrease the amount of violent crime. The flaw, though, will always be that some criminals use guns to commit crimes, so there’s an inextricable link, though it may not be causal: i.e. do criminals commit or not commit crimes based on whether they do or do not have access to firearms.

Bill

If we are going to broach politics could we please not rely on the fallacious concept that more guns equals less crime, which this implies, but nowhere near proves?

livingonenergydrinks

Yeah I agree it has to be tied to other things. When you look at the data if more guns meant less crime, there should be a proportional relationship, and really the rates haven’t changed that much in the last 16 years, though gun sales are through the roof.

The rates have changed rather quite a lot, actually; violent crime rates in the US dropped literally by half between 1992 and 2012, and by more than a third from 2000-2012. It’s clearly not as simple as a direct ratio of guns to crime, but this was more about flatly disproving the “guns = crime” narrative pumped out by the anti- Bill Of Rights propaganda machine.

Connor Christensen

I believe this is not meant to show that more guns equals less crime, but is meant to show that more guns does not equal more crime as media would have people believe. There is a reason not a single mainstream media has ever reported these statistics as far as I am aware

Ranger Rick

This cannot be right. Obama just said “we flood neighborhoods with guns so that it is easier to get a Glock than a book. ” Somebody is not telling the truth!

Did he say _which_ book? I mean, I can get a Glock easier than I can a first printing of Dune, which is a book.

(Pure sarcasm here.)

Ranger Rick

To me the irony was the reference to a book at all given the dropout and illiteracy rates in south Dallas.

Ryfyle

Speaking of Gun purchases. any one here think that if were to make more affordable Firearms we could get more Firearm owners?

David Harmon

Firearms are already ridiculously affordable.

Ryfyle

I’m talking about 100$ SKS affordable not one grand AR “Affordable”.

Dan

Perhaps we need legislation. The Affordable Firearms Act. A market place of competing companies.

livingonenergydrinks

The American Gun companies will lobby against it, as that means opening the doors to import guns from China, and that would put most companies out of business. You would be able to get the Glock knock off at Walmart for $49.99, why pay $550 for the real thing?

That problem has already been neatly dispensed with in the domestic firearm manufacturing industry’s favor by Executive Orders signed by one man… and that man’s name was… President William Jefferson Clinton!!! [John Cena theme plays loudly]

President Obama carried on the same tradition of politically motivated, openly protectionist trade policies “common sense gun control” by banning Russian firearm imports with the stroke of an imperial pen, because Democrats may hate the 2nd Amendment, but Bah Gawd they loves them some sweet, sweet lobbyist money, and domestic gunmakers are freakin’ well rollin’ in it.

David Harmon

That is an affordable AR. If you can’t afford $1k for an AR, you need to reevaluate your spending habits. and budgeting. If you can’t afford it because you are just barely scraping by, then you need to reevaluate both your spending and your income streams.

Now feeding it is far less affordable….

livingonenergydrinks

You bet, but to do that they would have to be made in China and imported over. Even with economies of scale, I don’t see anyone in the USA being able to make something like that for $100 and still be able to cover their costs.

livingonenergydrinks

There are two things that are more responsible for the reduction in crime. 1973 Abortion becomes legal. 1991 Internet. Thats a combination of People not Born, and People not leaving their homes for entertainment. If you want to reduce crime, run a Gigabit internet connection to every home in the ghetto, and watch crime rates drop due to less people leaving their homes.

allannon

And apparently the elimination of lead from fuel had a significant effect on…a lot of things. Criminal behavior, general dumbassery, mental health.

Wanderlust

Actually some major cable providers have a $10 internet plan for low income households..

livingonenergydrinks

I said GigaBit internet, not some POS 5 Mbit DSL connection.

Oldtrader3

Someone needs to tattoo these statistics inside Obama’s eyelids!

betterthanyou

Pearson Correlation coefficient…and just looking at the curves we can see that the correlation between “cumulative firearms on the market” and “homicides with firearms” is NOT as strong as you are inducted to believe…you just want to focus on the 2014 period and maybe the 1993 to demonstrate something…but that’s not how it works…
to paraphrase the President, drop the glock and read a math book to check by yourselves.